Raccah jokes with me that the rest of us really just like hearing her talk about her failures. But nobody was laughing last evening when she went into a litany of what failure had come to mean to her, and might mean to the rest of us.

“Fear actually is the promise of getting it right tomorrow.” That woke up everybody.

Raccah’s lines rolled through the cavernous Metropolitan Ballroom, filled with more than 1,000 exhausted conference-goers.

Dominique Raccah is onstage during this panel discussion Wednesday at Digital Book World Conference & Expo. Photo: Porter Anderson

Dominique Raccah is onstage during this panel discussion Wednesday at Digital Book World Conference & Expo. Photo: Porter Anderson

And I’ll have more from the conference tomorrow, Friday, at Writer Unboxed.

Some of our colleagues who heard Raccah speak are going back into offices today to work on failure. Some of them represent imprints, sales initiatives, marketing schemes, book launches, educational programs, design concepts, and whole publishing houses that will, no doubt, meet with hard, resounding, costly failure.

But “a failure-free environment is an innovation-free zone,” Raccah told the hushed assembly. “We have to rethink failure. We need better data, better processes, and more transparency around every step in publishing,” she pressed on. In 2008, when things were particularly tough in her shop, she said, she’d found herself “a constant complainer.” And she changed that.

“Failure,” she said, “can be an opportunity to come together, to create and strive together. Failure can be a moment of inspiration. ”

Not only is BEA embracing and recognizing the entrepreneurial author, but we do an awful lot of great things for them to level the playing field, treating them for what they are: producers of great content that is looking to reach its audience.

Steve Rosato

And Rosato is proving himself as good as his word.

If some saw a failure in BEA last year to offer entrepreneurial authors a place at the publishing table like that LBF had provided, Rosato and his team saw the experience as an opportunity to rethink, revise, and renew.

That turns out to be a timely way to describe what BEA and Rosato now are committing to do, right on the floor of the huge trade show in New York. Rather than giving entrepreneurial authors no option except to take a booth like anyone else or have no material presence at BEA, the show this year is generating the dedicated author-services locus that’s been missing in the Javits Center until now.

The uPublishU Author Hub at BEA is being established as an operational, fully functioning home base for entrepreneurial authors at the heart of BookExpo America. Rosato has asked me to program the new development. And I want to tell you something about it now.